Russia, not to be outdone by their puppet Trump, also declared a national emergency to combat an invasion last week.

The residents of Novaya Zemlya, a region of Russia whose name translates, roughly, as “frozen bog where you would have to be out of your friggin’ mind to live in the first place,” are being terrorized by invaders. These invaders are all white, as are the residents of Novaya Zemlya, so there is no racism involved. It’s more species-ism, since the invaders are polar bears.

There are eerie parallels to the Trumped-up emergency at our Mexican border. The bears are moving in on Novaya Zemlya because where they were living before is no good for them. Global warming, which is popular in Russia because that nation's most popular indoor sport is freezing your nipples off, is nonetheless causing the ice sheets up north to dissolve. This is where the bears make their living, killing seals that pop up through the ice to breathe. Now that there is no ice to pop up through, the seals can breathe anywhere they want, and wisely chose to inhale where there are no polar bears.

Likewise, the polar bears are doing a job no Novaya Zemlyan wants to do—going through the garbage of Novaya Zemlya and eating the bits that humans have already determined are too yucky to snack down on. The locals don’t appreciate this, however—they are frightened out of their skins when they see hungry polar bears roaming their streets, much as a wary American might panic because he or she overheard someone speaking Spanish at a Walmart. Russian parents won't send their kids to school, for fear of them being eaten at the bus stop, just like American parents are alarmed if their children have to go to school with a little brown kid who doesn't know how to text in English.

Like Mexico, the polar bears are not sending Russia their best polar bears. They are sending ALL their polar bears. All these beasts want is to escape starvation in their homelands. They are seeking asylum in Russian garbage dumps, eating frozen borscht and turnips, though if the Novaya Zemlyans have any freshly killed seal they don’t know what to do with, the bears would surely appreciate that.

Many of these polar bear caravans contain females and cubs, but that doesn’t cut them any slack in Russian opinion, because female and cub polar bears, just like the males, will kill you AND eat you, which even M-13 seldom does.

Faced with this bear invasion, the Russians are doing what any sensible nation that actually has a problem with immigrants coming in and terrorizing its citizens would do. They are separating the cubs from their mothers and putting them in cages, naturally, but most importantly, THEY ARE BUILDING A WALL!

​Fresh from accusing freshman Congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of wearing an un-socialist $7000 outfit to the State of the Union, having a lousy credit rating, being fired from Hot Dog on a Stick when she was a teenager, and being able to dance, Republicans are now searching for the ultimate prize—an AOC sex tape.

Firmly convinced that the toothy young socialist has somewhere along the line dropped a sex tape like Paris Hilton or a common Kardashian, GOP operatives are looking for it like it was the One Ring. They are trying to keep their expectations low, but there’s an undercurrent of excitement about what the tape could ultimately be found to contain.

“If it turns out that it’s just her and her boyfriend getting it on like any common heterosexual couple, that would be okay, as long as she’s moaning ‘Green New Deal! Green New Deal!’ every time she climaxes, and he’s grunting “’Medicare for All!’ as he dives into her sin cave,” said one Republican dirty trickster, who declined to be identified for this interview.

“But some of us are hoping for more. It could be a full-on leftist orgy, with Ocasio-Cortez getting ravished by multiple men, women, transgenders and a few lucky homeless veterans while she’s lying on a copy of the Constitution. Bernie Sanders would be presiding over the whole sex party, wearing nothing but his glasses and a Santa Claus beard. All the Democratic presidential candidates, all twenty-eight or so of them, would be lined up, pants-less or pants-suitless, waiting their turn for AOC’s sweet, social-democratic yoni.”

I highly doubt such a tape exists.

“Oh, it exists, all right. There’s only one problem. Melania’s in it, too.”

Arizona State Rep. Michelle Udall, R-Mesa, introduced a resolution declaring "pornography is a crisis leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts."

Several other states, Utah being the first, natch, have declared porn a public health crisis, and it was a plank in the 2016 Republican party platform, which you might have missed because the part where the platform said we ought to give the Ukraine back to Russia got all the publicity, but it was there.

The best way to react to the Arizona resolution is to shrug indifferently, and to remind yourself of the guiding principal of today’s political wars—anytime Republicans use a phrase that ends in “crisis,” you can be certain it is no big deal.

“Pornography is used pervasively, even by minors,” says Udall, which inspires a great big, “Well, duh,” on my part. Minors, especially minor boys, are the ones most desperately in need of porn, because onanism, or to use the scientific term, slapping the bishop, is an important daily activity in their young lives, one they engage in far more frequently than brushing their teeth and changing their underwear, because no teenage boy changes his underwear four times a day, unless he is a particularly clumsy masturbator.

Young men with mental health issues do not burst into schools, churches and movie theaters and start spraying porn at innocents. Immigrant caravans are not thronging the border because they can’t log on to PornHub from Guatemala. The electronic buzz of porn on tablets and cell phones probably contributes to global warming, but no more than the Fox News does by being on the TV in the waiting room of every fucking lube shop in the country. Seriously, the longer you can go between oil changes, the less Fox you have to watch.

Fortunately, for all of you porn stars and fans out there, the resolution does nothing to ban porn in Arizona. There will be no Sheriff Joe of porn, watching through the dust-caked windows of that arid state, making sure its citizens are not running up their credit card debt on cam girls. Stormy Daniels will not be forced to put on a white coat and go to work at a CVS in Nogales. Trump will still be able to download all the Arizona porn his mushroom craves when he visits Mar al Lago.

​It has come to this—after 2000+ years of Latin mumbling and Gregorian chanting, the Catholic Church has thrown the Dark Ages aside like they were an altar boy’s tightie-whities and embraced the ease and convenience of the cyber-era.

And by this I mean the Pope has an app.

You can download Click to Pray from the Google Play store just like any ordinary secular app that will tell you something you want to know, like how many steps you take a day vs. how much time you spend on the couch wishing the bong were close enough to reach, and in mere seconds you will be praying with Pope Francis.

Get ready for this, because the Pope prays big. There are none of the simple entreaties to the Almighty that we regular citizens send flying heavenward in our times of need on His Holiness's app, nothing like “Oh, God, please don’t let my wife find that motel key I might have left in the cup-holder,” or “Sweet Jesus, are the Patriots really going to win another fucking Super Bowl?” The Pope prays in multiple sentences, sometimes sentences with subordinate clauses. This month he is praying for human trafficking victims. It’s pretty drab compared to last month’s, when he was praying for the women of Latin America to stay away from temptation. The wise Pope knew that Carnival was coming up, and the Spanish-speaking women of the world were planning on drinking rum and wearing nothing but beads for a solid week. The Pope was reminding them to pray before partying.

But the eloquent-bordering-on-rambling nature of the Pope’s prayer portfolio needn’t trouble you—you just glance at the prayer, punch the icon and a quick “Like he said,” goes flying up to God. This so beats the shit out of Catholic prayer as I remember it, kneeling in some pew ramrod straight, because if you let your butt touch the seat behind you some nun would correct you with a fervent whack from a hymnal, muttering endless rosaries during services that were as long and as torturous as a Say Yes to the Dress marathon.

But Catholic kids nowadays—they can bang out Rosaries as quick as their sticky little fingers can fly over their touchscreens, and be back to playing Fortnite before the Mass really gets rolling. We had to stand, sit or kneel there woodenly, as the rhythm of the Mass called for it, watching our classmates genuflect back and forth, in my case paying particular attention to a seventh-grade girl named Barbara, who had matured into a size 38 bra by the time she was 12 years old, and was rumored to be dating a Marine. Even thinking about her now…

Numerous states introducing Bible Literacy classes, giving students the option of studying the Bible. Starting to make a turn back? Great!

Turn back to what? is what you might be thinking, and this column agrees. We don’t turn back for anything, unless it’s something really important, like a cooler full of beer.

But after parsing the Tweet above, you might start thinking that Trump, after suffering the loss of his political gonads in the shutdown fight with the Speaker, has, like many others before him, turned to the salve of religion in order to bind up his wounds.

Hah! Just kidding. The first time Trump ever touched a Bible in his life was when he groped one and lied about upholding the Constitution when he was sworn in. He’s just making political points with his Evangelical buds, who are behind this effort to get the Bible read in public schools by proclaiming its worth as literature that even bored little Jews and atheists ought to want to study.

This effort to turn the malleable minds of schoolchildren into a coterie of brainwashed Bible believers is, however, doomed to failure. If you want a kid to never pick up a book again, the best thing to do is force him or her to read it in school. How many of you have a copy of Moby Dick or A Tale of Two Cities on your shelves? Some of you, sure, but it’s the same copy you were supposed to read in 11th grade English class. And you didn’t read it then, and haven’t touched it since. It’s just there for you to recall, with a shudder, your failure to understand it in the least back in your high school days, and also your failure to lose your virginity until you got to college.

Or consider how many of you right now are thinking “I need to quit reading sarcastic shit on the Internet and pick up Pride and Prejudice again?” Exactly zero of you, even the ones who are wondering “When is this shit going to start to get funny?”

You can put Bibles in front of high schoolers’ faces all you want, but they’re still going to be far more concerned about whether they are one of the cool kids, or whether they need to avoid being beaten up by the cool kids, or whether they erased their browser history this morning because today is the only day of the month that their mom has the day off from both her jobs, than they are about Jesus. Tales of burning bushes and trumpeting angels will only be dimly recalled childhood horrors for them, like Melville, Austen and, God forbid, Henry James, are to us.

Besides, there’s all kinds of bits in the Bible that Christian parents don’t want their kids reading, like the part forbidding tattoos, which their mom, dad and favorite rap singers are covered in, or the part about not eating pork, because the Beer Belly Barbecue sponsors the school track team, or the part about not lending money at exorbitant interest rates, since without Mastercard, there wouldn’t be a Christmas, ever.

There’s also a big bit in the OT about an immigrant caravan tearing down a wall.

Shock waves reverberated through Washington this week, as Robert Mueller ended his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election after Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders proclaimed from the podium that it was God’s will that Donald Trump be President. A spokesman for Mueller’s office explained:

“We had really uncovered a boatload of evidence that it was Putin, the ex-KGB agent, busy, busy murderer and Oligarch of All the Oligarchs, who wanted Trump to be President, from the boatloads of cash the Russian prez had funneled to the Trump campaign to the disinformation war he waged on social media on Trump’s behalf, to all of those Democratic emails he had hacked and released, which no one, including ourselves, has actually read but which we all presumed to be horrifying, but now that the White House has revealed that it was actually God who pushed Trump over the finish line in 2016, what’s the point of all this investigating?”

When pressed for further explanation, the spokesman said, “Look, God is way out of our jurisdiction. People were already smirking about our pointlessly indicting those 13 Russians, because they’re never going to be extradited—they’re just going to sit over in Smolensk until they die, splitting a bottle of vodka with a different hooker every day, no matter what they did to us. God is even less likely to show up in court.

“Besides, as soon as Ms. Sanders announced that it was God who ordained Trump to be President, all of our targets changed their stories. Roger Stone confessed that it was not Guccifer 2.0, but the Angel Gabriel who had appeared to him to reveal the Word about Wikileaks. Paul Manafort said that he had been spreading the Gospel in the Ukraine, not collecting shady consulting fees and splitting bribes without registering as a foreign agent, and Trump Jr said that he was really thinking prayerfully about those Russian orphans after all, and that collecting dirt on Hillary was the last thing on his Christian mind when he took that Trump Tower Meeting.”

When asked if there was anyone who was still in legal danger from the Mueller probe, the spokesman replied, “Kushner, maybe, because he’s a Jew.”

Ainsley Earhardt, who believes in God and looking good in a short dress

This subject was briefly debated the other day on Fox and Friends, the morning television show that usually spends its time fawning over Trump’s latest attempt to mangle the Constitution. The entire exchange between hosts Brian Kilmeade and Ainsley Earhardt is reproduced below:​Ainsley asked, “You don’t think that God cares who wins the game, right?”

Kilmeade responded “I’m pretty sure God lets the game just play out,” which seemed to surprise Earhardt.

“I think God is in everything,” Earhardt proclaimed, which was followed by an angelic sound effect.

Ainsley is one of Fox’s interchangeable blondes, attractive women who look great in short dresses with their legs crossed and who probably had to have sex with Roger Ailes to get their jobs, but, unlike most people who were forced to have sex with Ailes, that has not cost Ainsley her faith. God is in everything, she says, on America’s fave cable network, including in the hearts and minds of huge professional athletes who merely think they are being managed by burly, stressed-out men wearing headphones who are desperately trying to outwit each other.

Kilmeade, on the other hand, is a football atheist who probably belongs on MSNBC.

Here, we do not see God having much of an interest in American football, unless He and Jesus bet on it. If they’ve got a little pool going, maybe with Mary, St. Peter, Lucifer and the Holy Ghost, though, all kinds of divine interventions are possible. Was it Jesus who temporarily blinded the referees at the Saints-Rams game, because he had the Rams but the Holy Ghost wouldn’t give him any points? Did Satan arrange for the Patriots to win the coin toss in overtime in their game against the Chiefs? Obviously, because Belichick and Brady long ago sold their souls to him, with Brady driving the harder bargain by getting Gisele Bundchen along with all that Super Bowl hardware.

Ordinarily, you would think that Jesus would always take the Saints on account of their name, but Up High He is thoroughly sick of His saints, a bunch of monks and virgins who are about as much fun as a tonsillectomy, and He hates to be reminded of them. There are teams that everyone in Heaven and Hell dislikes, like the Browns and the Chargers, so they never win anything. St. Peter is an Atlanta fan, and the Falcons' epic giveaway of the Super Bowl to the Pats in 2017 was God’s punishment to him for letting Steve Jobs into Heaven.

Mary, the original passive-aggressive martyr bitch, likes the Carolina Panthers, just because no one else does, and is always threatening to appear in their locker room, because she’s sick of her contract that says she can only appear to groups of small children who don’t speak English. The Holy Ghost claims not to favor any particular team, but all the others say He’s just a bandwagon-jumper.

All this speculation is fascinating, but Fox is just content with wondering whether God determines the result of football games. Even that is beneath their dignity, because as far as we can tell, Fox has never even debated the biggest question about God, i.e., is He white?

Chaos reigned in Washington, DC today immediately following the resignation of Donald Trump, which most observers thought was inevitable after geriatric screwup Rudy Giuliani accidentally posted the pee tapes to Instagram.

Trump’s resignation, delivered on Twitter, which consisted of two sentences, “I’m outta here. Thanks for the Emulomints,” was vague enough that no one even went looking for the Vice President for several hours. It was not until Air Force One was spotted on a straight path to Russian air space that anyone realized that Trump had skedaddled out of the highest office in the land, and when Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts went looking for Pence to swear him in as #46, the VP was nowhere to be found. Another crucial half hour passed before Pence’s Secret Service detail confessed shamefacedly that Pence had been Raptured right before their eyes.

“He suddenly sprouted a big set of angel wings and just flapped off towards Heaven,” one of the embarrassed agents said. “I know we’re supposed to take a bullet for the people we protect, but none of us were ready for this. I mean, one of the guys tried to grab him by the shoes, but he couldn’t hold on. All that’s left of Pence in this world is one size 10 1/2 wingtip.”

Defense Department officials confirmed that the Rapture had indeed taken place. “People are missing from all over the world, except in America. It seems that possibly the only person Raptured here was Pence, although both Nick Foles and Miley Cyrus can’t be found, either. Even the Vice President’s wife is busy at her day job, teaching art and homophobia to six-year-olds. Everyone else in the US was Left Behind because they were unworthy. We blame PornHub.”

Roberts, conscious of his constitutional duty, went straight away to the Capitol and swore in Pelosi as President. Pandemonium broke out in both parties, as the Republicans in the Senate tried to get a resolution passed declaring Pelosi the Antichrist. It failed because some of the Senators wanted to vote for Beto O’Rourke instead. Still others wanted Mitt Romney. “Hey, Mitt really wants to be something,” one of his backers explained. In the meantime, the Democrats went into full backstabbing mode over who was going to be the next Speaker of the House.

Pelosi proved to be a decisive leader, however. As her first act, she appealed to NATO to shoot down Air Force One before it could make it to Moscow. The Norwegian Air Force was more than happy to comply. “Fucking aye,” was their official response, and Trump’s plane was soon a debris field in the North Atlantic. Large numbers of state secrets, gold-plated urinals and bundles of cash were being recovered, along with multiple cheeseburgers, from the choppy waters off the Norwegian coast.

Pelosi will address the nation tonight. The title of her speech is said to be, “The End Times Will Be the Best Times, Thanks to the Democratic Party, And Also, I Need A New Plane.”

He did not say it was the worst day of the year for him personally, because for a Life Coach and Happiness Consultant, there are no bad days—it would hurt business—and your job is merely to distract people from the fact that life is a slow process towards a painful, aging death. Or contracting a fatal illness in your prime. Or a quick, unexpected sign-out that can happen at any time.

Most people want to be distracted from this, so Cliff’s job is a piece of cake. No wonder he’s so fucking happy all the time. Let’s take a look at the situation of someone who might decide he needs a happiness coach. He wakes up alone in a hotel room, surrounded by empty whiskey bottles. He has no memory of the night before. He cannot find his wallet containing his cash and credit cards, because it was in his pants, which he also cannot find. Instead of realizing that he needs to start going to AA meetings, he decides he is desperately unhappy. He calls Cliff. For a couple hundred bucks, Cliff tells him he needs to start going to AA meetings.

This is way easier work than coal mining or selling insurance, and Cliff’s happy that he’s got the gig and you don’t. But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and examine his reasoning behind his theory that today is the worst day of the year, and this column’s thoughts on how to make it better. Cliff’s excuses for January depression are in italics.

The holidays are truly over, and you’re broke from splurging on Christmas. Yeah, so what? There are plenty of other ways to go broke during the year. Congratulate yourself for waiting until the twelfth month to make it happen.

The weather is terrible, and there’s still lots of winter to come. Live in Australia until July, which is their January.

Most people have abandoned their New Year’s resolutions by now. Avoid this by not making any resolutions. Chances are, you’re never going to be thinner, richer, or get laid more than you are now, so wall off depression by not thinking you can change that.

If you’re doing Dry January, it has amazing health benefits, but it doesn’t exactly lend itself to going out. The answer to this problem is completely obvious. Dry January wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for social media’s habit of promoting really shitty ideas, and Dry January is the worst one since Trump being President. If God wanted us to sit in the cold and dark sober, He would not have invented winter ales, or liquor stores that deliver. We don’t do Dry January here because it would mean waking up with a massive hangover on February 2nd, which would ruin one of our favorite holidays, Groundhog Day.

Arnall doesn't even mention the most plausible reason for being depressed on the third Monday in January, which is that it is Martin Luther King Day and you don't get it off.

Arnall offers solutions. Plan a fun fitness vacation to someplace exotic and warm. Strike the word “fitness” from that and it describes the cruise along the Mexican Riviera we just got back from exactly. So, we don’t always disagree with Arnall.

The whole fakey nature of the article is exposed by the picture accompanying it, which we have conveniently cribbed off the Internet, an elegantly dressed model sitting in a window well pretending to be sad. What’s she got to be depressed about? She has a house big enough to have window wells and a pair of boots that’s worth more than our Mexico car (2003 Dodge Neon, 158,000 miles). Now put a picture of a real depressed person there, sitting in a lawn chair in her kitchen because one of her regular chairs is being repaired but she can’t afford to get it out of the shop, in a worn bathrobe, amid a clutter of unwashed dishes, with a pile of collection notices, losing lottery tickets and a parking violation sitting in front of her, crying softly. There’s a lady who needs a life coach.

But Arnall wouldn’t take her case. Probably bum him out too much, and it's already the worst day of the year.

With paleolithic congressman Steve King sidelined from any committee seats in the next Congress for wondering out loud when “white supremacy” became a bad word, some of you may wonder when white supremacy became a concept at all.

The answer is, surprisingly, not so long ago. Civilization was invented by the Chinese, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, etc., none of whom were white. All of these early civilizations probably thought they were cooler and more badass than anybody else, like all arbitrary collections of humans usually do, from tribes to neighborhoods to military units to Philadelphia Eagles fans, and they would have laughed at the idea that they were inferior to whites, who at the time were living in smelly lean-tos in Europe, having spear fights with each other and occasionally providing nourishment for wolves and bears.

The Greeks became the first white people to take a stab at civilization. They invented science, drama, philosophy and long, boring epic poems. They took sculpture to new heights, although they apparently thought only men with small penises were worthy models for their statues, or else those guys were forced to model only on really cold days. Finally, they picked up a rookie warrior from the minor leagues of Macedonia to spread their civilization all over the world. There is no evidence that Alexander the Great thought much about white supremacy, though. Anyone with a yearning for a career in the rape-and-plunder field was welcome to join his forces.

It fell to the Romans to be the next hot white thing, and they did the job proud, ruling their patch of the world for 800 years by wearing skirts, helmets with toilet brushes on top and using their short swords to chop up anybody who laughed at their wardrobes. They chopped up the white people of Gaul and the swarthy folks of Carthage equally, however, so playing the race card to a Roman legion did not result in you not getting slaughtered, or even being left in more generous bits.

The Roman Empire finally fell, and the ancestors of today’s white supremacists celebrated by becoming peasants under the yoke of the Catholic Church, and got their fun from burning heretics and having plagues. They eventually got into religious warfare, which had been invented by the Jews and perfected by the Muslims, but which white people went at with great enthusiasm. This caused them to develop better weapons than anybody else. When they got tired of fighting people equally well-armed, they said to themselves, “Hey—let’s try out some of these muskets and galleons on those people that Chris Columbus just discovered.” They went to the Americas and found that cannons and steel swords worked great against spears and stone axes. Then they discovered that you could easily convert the locals to Christianity at gunpoint and then they would build cathedrals for you. The first inklings of white supremacy were stirred.

In no country was the concept of white supremacy received more enthusiastically than in a boggy island in the North Atlantic called Britain. This nation of pale alcoholics went off to conquer the world and, between gin breaks, succeeded at most of it, including many parts of it that had been pre-conquered by other white people. They only had trouble with a breakaway bit in North America that eventually turned itself from a hodgepodge of querulous states to the greatest nation on Earth. White supremacists were happy to go along for the ride.

One of their major achievements was to raise the bar for whitehood extremely high—at one point in the US, such obviously melanin-deprived people as the Irish and the Poles were written off as non-white. Likewise, those Greeks and the descendants of the Romans were derided as dark and inferior. Popular feelings ran high against non-Anglos, and campaigns were organized to keep them out of the country. These didn’t succeed, as the growing nation needed these people to do its manual labor and later on, fight in World Wars.

Today, white supremacy is far more sophisticated and thoughtful in the US. Far from being looked-down upon, Irish-Americans and Polish-Americans are now freely afforded the opportunity to become white supremacists themselves. In this ongoing spirit of tolerance, the Greeks and the Italians have been let back into the white club, too, especially when Steve King speaks fondly about western civilization, which they started and which King regularly claims is endangered by Mexicans.

Funny thing is, though, without western civilization, we wouldn’t have Mexicans at all.